Over the past decade, the number of available media sources has increased. For example, media consumers who are interested in news can receive information from news channels, Internet web logs (blogs), news aggregation web sites, podcasting, and the like. While broadcast television news channels typically provide edited video content, consumers often lack the time or the patience to watch an entire news program to see particular segments that are of interest.
Some organizations offer subscription news services for transmitting breaking news to a subscriber's electronic device (such as a mobile telephone, a pager, a personal digital assistant, and the like) based on the subscriber's preferences. However, such services typically utilize a centralized server architecture to deliver the content. With the volume of media content available, providing the variety of media content desired by different consumers can be complicated and expensive. Such systems can also be difficult to scale to accommodate more consumers and more content. Moreover, consumers can desire to view media content on various types of electronic devices, which can have different display capabilities, different types of network connections, and so on. Consequently, a centralized system can have difficulty providing a consistent quality of service to each of its consumers. Hence, there is a need for an improved system and method of media distribution.